


there's freedom to, and freedom from

by arbitrarily



Category: Bad Times at the El Royale (2018)
Genre: Dubious Consent, F/M, Power Play, Pre-Canon, Sex Used as Bargaining, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-23
Updated: 2018-12-23
Packaged: 2019-09-24 12:40:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17100782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: When you make a deal with the devil you can't be surprised when you start to burn.





	there's freedom to, and freedom from

**Author's Note:**

  * For [days4daisy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/days4daisy/gifts).



> Title from ["Sprinter"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6SIw30IOt8) by TORRES.
> 
> I hope you have a very happy holiday and a happy Yuletide!

 

 

She drives all night, for two nights straight. 

She doesn't sleep. Her eyes are gritty, dry, the window rolled down, the highway air meeting her each mile she travels west. She knows: they will never go back home. The realization finds her at a gas station somewhere in East Texas. She hasn’t been on the road all that long, but dawn has found her already. Time goes liquid on the road at night. This is another thing she knows now. 

The gas station attendant is just opening up.

“You traveling alone there, little lady?”

Emily is so tired. She still has so far to go. She flips the gas station attendant off. 

 

 

 

 

Rose had sent her a letter. Written in her own hand, on lined paper, the lefthand side shredded and still curling from where it had been ripped from a spiral-bound notebook. A notebook Emily had most like bought for Rose. The letter was written in Rose’s hand—those wide, flat oval O’s and her R’s like plateaued mesas, nothing capitalized—all of the ink smudged as if written in a great hurry and with less thought. She’d been gone going on three months. The letter read like a ransom note. 

_i’ve gone and don’t you look for me. it’s better here. i been wandering and lost for so long now, and you should be pleased to know i’m found. billy loves me as he loves all of us. and i love you!_

The envelope was postmarked. Folsom, California. It was a start. 

She left that night. 

 

 

 

 

Rose’s face falls when she spots Emily getting out of her car. Emily doesn’t move for a beat; she watches her sister instead. Rose’s face goes from slack to forced happiness to something in between, as if switching through the stations on the television. Emily watches her face the entire time she approaches her, coming ever closer. She wants to see if her face will flicker like that again. 

“Emily!” Rose calls to her. Her mouth stretches in a grin. The grin falls once Emily is in front of her. When Emily hugs her.

“How’d you find me?”

 

 

 

 

You can find anybody if you try hard enough. Emily spends a week sleeping in her car. She keeps Rose’s letter in the back pocket of her jeans, folded and refolded so many times the paper has begun to tear along the creases. It’s in a diner in a small beach town that she finally gets a name: Billy Lee. 

“You got an address to go along with that?”

The waitress folds her arms over her chest. “Honey, we just having met and all I could be well off my mark, but you look too sweet a thing to be wanting to get mixed up in all that fella brings with him.”

“You’re well off your mark,” Emily says. 

 

 

 

 

Billy makes sense to Emily immediately. He is ridiculously, stupidly, attractive. She can see in the instant she meets him why Rose would be willing to throw anything and everything away for a man like him.

He wears his shirt open, hanging off his shoulders. All tanned and toned skin bared beneath, the twin cuts of muscle pointing down to the low waist of his jeans, more threat than enticement. The coincidence of the California sun setting behind him has him looking like the kind of religious iconography old women cling to and pray. 

“You came all the way out here from Alabama to see your baby sis?” He leans into her. “Aren’t you a peach.” He says it like she’s anything but. He’s not wrong. 

 

 

 

 

“If you’re going to stay, then you have to try.” Rose says it on Emily's second morning with them.

“Try what?” Emily says. That morning, she had gone to make coffee only to find an intricate machinery of chores already in motion. Everyone, she could see, knew their rightful place. A hierarchy, Billy reigning at the top. 

Rose doesn't answer her with words. Her face is sharp, cruel even. Grown. A flash of something like violence in her eyes, the way afternoon storms roll in fast and punishing.

“I’ll try,” Emily says. She knows full well she does not mean it as Rose intended. 

 

 

 

 

It’s hard to find Billy alone. She says as much to him. His grin in reply is self-aware as much as it is self-serving. 

“I won’t have you spoiling the fun here, Emily,” he says. He says it gently mocking, like in any other world the two of them could be good old friends. 

“You think that's why I been looking for you?” She purses her lips, shakes her head. “I’d like to make a deal,” she says. She’s not sure when she made the decision. Maybe it was when she first saw him. Maybe it was Rose, watching Emily get out of the car, rehearsing how to react. Maybe it was when Emily loaded up the car and began to drive. But here she is. Offering herself for Rose. Ain’t nothing in this world can’t be traded. “Take me, instead of her.”

Billy smiles that much wider.

“You think you’re worth one of her?”

She has no patience for men, least of all when they mistake their riddling nonsense as if it’s cleverness. Nothing new under the sun.

“I think a real man wants a woman can handle herself. Otherwise, what’ve you got but a coward.”

He doesn’t like that, but that doesn’t matter. She’s set a challenge and his pride won’t let him back down from that. From her. 

“Tonight,” he says.

“Tonight,” she says. 

 

 

 

 

As girls, Emily would read to Rose before bed. Their mother, rest her soul, had kept an old volume of Greek mythology. _The Dictionary of Classical Mythology_. The girls kept it under Rose’s bed. They hid a lot of things under there. This book. A beloved one-eyed teddy bear. Emily’s piggy bank. Rose, herself, on the bad nights. 

One night Emily read to Rose the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. When Emily shut the book, Rose was propped up against the pillows, bright-eyed and awake, gnawing at her bottom lip. 

“He’s stupid,” she finally said. “They told him what to do. Why’d he have to look back?”

The house was quiet that night. Eventually, their father would return home. Emily's entire life had become a timetable of avoidance, the whims of men. 

“Because,” she finally said. “He had to know. He couldn’t trust it.”

 

 

 

 

That night, Billy places her in front of the mirror in his room. He pulls her hair back off her face. He holds it in a loose fist, his hand drawing through the thick length of it again and again. Anyone else, and it might be soothing. She thinks it would be better if he would just yank, hard. The only thing worse than actual violence, Emily knows, is the undelivered promise of it. 

He pushes her shirt off her shoulder, baring more skin to him. Emily doesn’t react. She doesn't watch him in the mirror. She keeps her eyes trained on her own face. She looks the same as she always looks. Enduring.

Billy must notice. His hand moves from her hair to the nape of her neck. His fingers wind around her throat. A soft squeeze in warning, and her breath hitches. She lifts her eyes to him, but he has his head bowed now. Only the top of his head visible, his face pointed down towards her. 

“You think she’ll get older, lookin’ like you?” The only tell she gives is the tremble of her bottom lip. She’s solid just as fast. Ungiving. Billy leans in that much closer to her, the heat of his body unbearable at her back, his mouth just as hot at her ear. “I think she’ll be prettier.”

Emily could laugh. Men think a girl’s ego is just as fragile as their own. Instead, she tips her head back. Her throat stretches into his grip. She finally looks at his face in the mirror. He’s no longer handsome to her. He could be anybody. Any man. His hand looks monstrously wide against the pale column of her throat. 

“Are you gonna fuck me, or what?” she says. 

 

 

 

 

Rose only left after Daddy died. That’s the part Emily can’t make sense of: they’re safe now. There’s no need to run. 

They were safe. Emily had seen to that. 

 

 

 

 

Billy has her draped, naked, on his bed. He’s on his knees before her, his mouth open and wet, tonguing into her. He pulls back from her cunt, his mouth wet and lazing at her trembling inner thigh, biting now and again. This is taking too long, she thinks. Emily had thought he would simply bend her over, have her like that, brutal and efficient. Instead, it’s this—the Last fucking Supper, she thinks ruefully. 

She looks down her body to find him looking up at her. His mouth is glistening. His eyes on her, he drags the blunt pad of his thumb down the seam of her, threatening to part her to him. Her thighs clench; she shudders a little on a drawn-in breath. He does it again, pushing into her that much more each time. Her cunt tries to close around him. He chuckles to himself. 

“Do you know what the girls usually have to do to earn this?”

Emily screws her eyes shut. She doesn't want to think of that. She doesn’t want to think of the girls, sacrificial in her mind—more so even than she is right now, spread out for his consumption.

“I’m not one of your girls,” she grits out, her teeth clenched.

He crawls up her body then; everything he does is predatory and claiming. His body is heavy on hers, makes her feel like she could not just sink into the mattress but the floor beneath, the earth’s crust. He still has his clothes on, his shirt fluttering around her like a burial shroud. It stinks of stale smoke, marijuana. Him. His jeans scratch at her bare skin; the button and the zip as well as his hard cock beneath dig into her hip. 

“Not yet you’re not,” he says. He reaches his hand down between their bodies and he drags his fingers through her slick and his spit, forces two thick fingers inside her abruptly. She hisses; her hips rock down onto his hand. She aches. It feels good. “You’re wet just like them,” he says. 

Emily laughs, bitter, the sound broken when he twists his fingers in her. Drags them out, plays with her clit with distracted disinterest. “There’s not a thing about you better than those girls.” He removes his hand and a low noise catches in her throat. He drags his wet hand up her body, settles on her breast. His fingers twist her nipple, too hard to be interested in her own pleasure. She moans all the same. He likes that. 

Emily feels sweaty, overworked and overwrought already. She shoves at his shoulder, gets that shirt off of him. She rolls her hips, slips her hand down the loose waist of his jeans. He’s heavy and thick, leaking, in her hand. She fists him roughly, her hand dry as it squeezes, twists the head of his cock. A startled grunt escapes his mouth. “You seem to like me well enough,” she says. 

She forces him to his back. It’s hard work; he’s a big man. Nothing she ain't managed before. She leans over him and strands of her hair catch against his wet mouth. “I know,” she says, the sound rumbling from her chest to his where they are pressed flush together. She rocks her hips down onto his and his own buck up against her. “Those girls would do anything for you.” She gets his jeans past his hips as she talks. Her voice catches as she settles hot and wet against his cock. “But don’t you want one who actually knows what she's doing?”

He’s too thick to take easily, but he thrusts his hips up into her all the same, making her take it. Take him. Her fingers curl into his chest, hard enough to draw blood, as she arches away from him. It's too much. His grip is bruising, tight on her hips, his face dark, empty with pleasure. 

“You won’t touch her,” she gasps. She rides him. The words are difficult to form; she’s so wet she can hear it. “You won’t hurt her.” Emily’s head drops forward. Her thighs are shaking so hard it’s difficult to keep pace. Billy rolls them then, has her trapped under him. He’s still not talking, each noise that comes from him snarled and desperate. Pathetic. Emily grips at his throat. “When you want,” she tries to say, fights through a whimper. "You don't go to her. Come to me." It feels like he's splitting her in half. “Hurt me,” she says. Spits the words at him. “Hurt me instead.”

He obliges.

Tomorrow, Billy will have them build a fire. They, his followers, will gather around it. Rose will be among them. Billy will look to Emily. And then he will go, he’ll take what he said was his. Rose.

When Emily comes, it feels a lot like defeat. 

 

 

 

 

The first night she arrives, Emily shares Rose’s cot with her. They lie beside each other the same way they did as children: facing each other in the middle, their bodies curled outward and away.

Emily reaches and she pushes Rose’s bangs out of her eyes. These are new; her hair had been long and loose last Emily saw her. So much about her is new now. She never thought people could become strangers to each other that fast. 

“Is he good to you?” Emily says. Her voice is barely above a whisper. 

Rose’s eyes flutter, open and shut. “Of course he is he loves me,” she says, all in one breath. Like a child. Like a fucking child.

“Alright then,” Emily says. “Go to sleep,” she says. She watches as Rose’s eyes close. She waits for Rose's breathing to gentle, the way it always used to as she drifted off beside her. Away. Emily is tired, but she doesn’t sleep. Not yet. Because she knows: he isn’t. He doesn’t. 

 

 

 

 


End file.
